Ungdom, 1910

CommentarySuffering from numerous complaints, Munch travelled from Berlin to Warnemünde in the summer of 1907 to recover. There he made, against the natural backdrop of the North Sea coast, life-sized paintings of men swimming. A year later, Munch added to the ‘Bathing men’ two other, smaller canvases, one a boy bathing and the other an old man bathing, naming the triptych conceived as a depiction of the ages of man ›Men on the Beach‹. ›Bathing Child‹ in the Museum Folkwang is an earlier version of the panel on the left. The making of the painting caused a scandal. It was seen as offensive that both Munch and his models had been naked when he was working on his canvas on the beach. Gustav Schiefler, at the time director of the State Courts in Hamburg and an important collector of Expressionist graphic arts, was the first owner of this painting. Schiefler published the first catalogue of Munch’s graphic works in 1907.